Criminal charges have been laid in fewer than 20% of cases where Queensland police lodged an application for a contravention of a domestic violence order over the past year, a commission of inquiry has heard.
A public hearing on Monday heard police lodged 50,704 applications for contraventions of domestic violence protection orders in 2021-22, while 9,347 charges were laid for a range of domestic and family violence related criminal offences.
Breaching an order – which sets out specific rules for perpetrators, such as not approaching a victim at home or work – can result up to three years in jail for the first offence and up to five years if they breach again within five years.
The commission of inquiry, which has the powers of a royal commission, is examining police culture and the response to domestic violence.
On Monday Queensland police’s head of the domestic, family violence and vulnerable persons command, assistant commissioner Brian Codd, said officers were working to address their own responses to domestic violence as the state moves towards criminalising coercive control.
“What we’re learning is that our ability to recognise some of those more subtle controlling behaviours, which might also relate to a criminal offence … is an area that we’ve got to improve on,” Codd told the inquiry.
“But we’re also mindful that a number of the applications for instance, may well be for behaviours that don’t meet a criminal threshold.”
Codd also noted figures, from the Domestic and Family Violence Death Review and Advisory Board, that either the victim or the perpetrator had domestic-violence-related contact with police in 65% of homicide cases.
“It raises the notion that there might have been an opportunity to intervene and therefore played some part in preventing the homicide,” he said.
Domestic violence incidents previously sat under the Queensland police’s crime, counter-terrorism and specialist operations unit until March 2021.
Codd said police had “a long way to go” in making sure the dedicated unit was adequately resourced, as there was “very limited” analytical and research capacity. Two key researchers had also been seconded to the women’s safety and justice taskforce “for quite some time”.
Officers were also feeling “fatigued” as they respond to an enormous caseload, with Queensland police spending over 40% of their time attending to domestic and family violence incidents, Codd said.
“Last week I was speaking to a senior constable from Logan who explained that her shift can involve going to five different domestic incidents and at the end of the shift, she will go home at night and cannot sleep for worrying about … whether she missed something,” Codd said.
The inquiry heard there were several issues with a draft manual for Queensland police officers, including that it does not identify domestic violence as a gendered issue despite the majority of victims being women.
Further issues were raised with a confusing statement in the unpublished police manual.
The statement advised officers to comply with commissioner directives or “seek advice from the officer in charge” if content in the manual conflicts with legislation or commissioner directives.
“I don’t think that’s a very healthy or helpful statement,” Codd told the hearing.
“We shouldn’t be putting out a manual that’s in conflict with legislation, policies, procedures. The point of it is to … make things simpler for our officers.”
Public hearings will continue in Brisbane this week. The inquiry will later hold four weeks of hearings in regional Queensland.
The inquiry will hear from experts, legal representatives, support workers and First Nations and regional officers.
The inquiry is expected to report to the government by 4 October.
